Showing posts with label Picasa. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

What is Creative-Kit, and how to use it

This article describes Creative Kit, which is a photo-editing tool for enhancing pictures in your Picasa-web and Google+ albums.

A little history: Picasa, Picnik and Creative Kit

In 2002, a company called Lifescape created a program called Picasa, which people could use to manage photos on their PC.

Google purchased this in 2004 and then integrated it with web-storage, linked to a person's Google account, to make Picasa-web-albums: see Understanding Picasa and Picasa-web-albums for more information about how they work together with Blogger.

Picasa has some photo-editing functions (cropping, red-eye removal, sharpening, lightening, making collages, etc). Useful, far easier to use than Photoshop - but without features that some people wanted. So in 2010, Google integrated a photo-editing tool from Picnik, a small company that was offering a subscription-based photo hosting and editing service.

Picnik's editor did some cooler things than Picasa, (applying visual effects, watermarks, etc). The tool had some serious fans, and a quirky culture which saw them show messages like "packing the lunch" "watching the flowers", "chasing butterflys" while Picnik was loading. The type of messages that are funny the first few times, but quickly get tedious. And people using Picnik via Piscasa-web-albums often found that it was very slow.

In 2012:

Picnik announced that they were closing down their separate photo hosting service, and moving the product to Google+.

Google's announced that they were were closing Picnik, and using Picnik's engineers to “continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products." (ref: closure announcement).

Today, the original Picnik photo-hosting-and-editing service is most definitely closed.

The Picnik photo editor has been either replaced with or re-badged as "Creative Kit", and is available through Google+. They may have intended to make it available through Picasa-web-albums too - but as I noted in previously, this feature isn't working. Possibly this is about selling additional storage space: Picasa-web-albums are available to any Google account, while Google+ Photos is only available to named individuals. So each person can have lots of Google / Picasa accounts (with free storage on each one), but only one account Google+ account.

How to access Creative Kit today

To start creative Kit, so you can edit a photo with it:

Go to Google+, and log in to your Google account that has Google-Plus enabled.
Go to your Photos page (which may be on the left-sidebar, or under the More tab on the left sidebar if your screen is small)

Go into an album, and open the photo you want to edit.
On the menu at the top of the screen, click the Edit button.

This opens the photo inside a window with photo-editing tools. The screen just looks like another set of options within Google-Plus, but actually you are now inside Creative Kit, and you can use it to edit your photo.

When you are finished editing, choose the Save button from the top-left hand side. This give you an option to apply your changes to the current file, or to save a new copy of the file.

If you choose Replace then any places (eg blog-posts) that link to the existing photo will now link to the edited photo.

If you choose Save a new copy then your existing file is not changed and a new copy of the file will be made in the same folder as the existing one but with a slightly different name.

If you upload pictures into your blog-posts inside Blogger, then the picture files are stored in Picasa-web-albums LINK. If you have Google+ enabled for your account, then you can access these photos directly through either Picasa-web-albums or through Google+, even if you have not linked your blog and your Google+ profile. So you can use the Creative-kit method of editing these pictures, even if you didn't load them via Google+.

What features are available in Creative Kit

At one point Picnik used a "fremium" approach: Basic features were free for everyone to use for free, while people needed to sign up and pay a subscription to use the Premium ones. This has changed, though,and now features are are all free.

At the time of writing, the features include:

Basics

Black and White
Bocal B&W
Boost
Soften

Camera

Lomo-ish
Holga-ish
HRD-ish
CinemaScope
Orton-ish
1960s

Colours:

Tint
Vibrance
Duo-Tone
Heat Map 2.0
Cross-Process

Touchup

Blemish Fix
Shine-be-Gone
Airbrush
Sunless Tan

Google Plus Exclusives

Daguerreotype
Reala 400
Green Fade
Magenta Fade
Polaroid* Plus
Sun Aged

Troubleshooting / Where to get help

Creative Kit uses Adobe Flash Player. If Creative Kit doesn't work inside Google+, try installing a newer version of Flash Player.

If that doesn't help, try:

Clearing your cache

Clearing Flash shared objects
These are data files are created by the Creative Kit on your computer, like cookies. To clear them, go to Abobe's Flash Player help web site.
The Settings Manager that you see is not just an image; it's the actual Flash Player Settings Manager. Scroll through the list of sites and select www.picnik.com and www.gstatic.com.

Click the Delete Website button for each, and confirm the deletion.

Open the Global Storage Settings Panel. Check both of the following boxes:
- Allow third-party Flash content to store data on your computer.
- Store common Flash components to reduce download times.

Once you've cleared your local shared objects, clear your browser cache again.

Using a different browser, eg Chrome or Firefox.

Disabling ad-blocker or flash-blocking extensions

For more assistance, there is a Creative Kit help-centre in Google:
https://plus.google.com/100432630524345907101#100432630524345907101/posts

Is Creative Kit just Picnik with a new name?

Most probably: the controls and features are very similar, and the press-releases seem to tie up. There is one screen that names both while the photo-editor is loading in Google+>Pictures.

But on the other hand there's no official confirmation either, and there are some product differences. It's possible that Google's engineers were simply inspired by the former Picnik colleagues to create similar controls, and that the underlying photo-editing tool is different. Who knows.

What we do know is that many of the much-loved Picnik features are available in Creative-Kit, provided you're willing to load your photos to a Google+ account.

TL;DR

You can edit a photo in Creative Kit by uploading it to your Google+ account, then choosing the Edit button when you are viewing it.

This may be the same Picnik photo editor that was available in Picasa-web-albums until 2012. Or it may not. Either way it lets you crop, re-colour, apply lots of filters etc for free.

Don't want to put your photos into Google+? Bad luck, there's no other way to use Creative Kit / Picnik on them at the moment. Find another on-line editor instead.

Creative-kit works with pictures accessed through Google+, but not Picasa-web-albums

Adding a picture to a blog post

Introducing Picasa vs Picasa-web-albums

Sunday, October 7, 2012

Creative Kit photo editor works in Google+, if not in Picasa

This Quick-Tip is about using the Creative Kit, which has been giving me grief recently when I tried to use it from Picasa-web-albums.

For ages, I've occasionally used the photo-editor in Picasa-web-albums (the online version of Picasa) to edit photos that I've already uploaded, and want to change without changing the URL. This editor was originally Picnik - until Google sold that product and replaced it with Creative Kit a while ago.

This has sometimes been slow, which was annoying, but I put up with it because it was just so useful.

But recently it stopped working totally: it would load, the progress-bar would get about half-way along the screen, and then hang, with a message:

We noticed Picnik is loading slowly. It’s possible waiting
may solve this issue. If you’re still having trouble:
[t1] Click for Assistance»

Waiting never solved the problem for me (trust me, I tried), so eventually I tried the help-link, which went to this Picnik help page.

After following lots of the instructions, I finally found this helpful line in the Adope Flash Player re-installation instructions:

If you are using the Google Chrome browser, Adobe® Flash® Player is built-in but has been disabled. To enable Flash Player, follow the steps in this TechNote

Which sounded hopeful - it's only recently that I've switched to use Chrome all the time, so maybe this was the problem. But it didn't help - despite what they said, Flash was enabled in my setup.

Eventually, it occurred to me that since I have a Google Plus profile, my albums are now accessible via the Plus interface too. So I went there, chose Photos, found the album, opened a photo, chose creative kit ... held my breath for a few seconds ... and the editor opened up and worked nicely.

I'd still like to get this working from Picasa, because it just looks so much nicer from the small screen that I use a lot of the time. Suggestions are very welcome!

PS Thanks to Hardeep of Widget Craft who used the picture that I'd made as the thumbnail picture for How to Edit Your Blogger Template in one of his articles, and thus inspired me to start putting my own name onto the image files I make.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Crop and re-size photos stored in PIcasa, without HTML

Some very interesting info from David of Blogger Xpertise about controlling the display of photos from Picasa by manipulating the URL. What he's found is nothing that we couldn't do with HTML, but I have a feeling that it might point to some other possibilities using Picasa's URLs. Ref: http://blogxpertise.blogspot.com/2012/05/tip-automatically-cropping-square-and.html

Friday, January 20, 2012

Picnik is ending on 19 April 2012

The first list of Google application retirements for 2012 includs Picnik, a photo editing tool that was accessible via Picasa-web-albums (and perhaps from other places too) - it was an effective, though slow, way of adding a watermark to pictures.

I'm sure that PWA has a replacement tool for doing this ... don't have time to research what it is right now.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Backing up picture files from Picasa-web-albums

Google Takeout (called Takeaway in some places) lets you backup your Picasa-web-albums, Gmail contacts, Circles, +1s and lots of other things, into one single zip file, which you can then store in a safe, off-line place.

It might be a way to move the photos in your blog to someone else if you're transferring owership of a blog.

back them up
extract them
sent the pictures to the other person
they upload them, and re-establish the links from the blog to the new location.

Still dreadfully tedious, but better than nothing.

Monday, May 30, 2011

Putting a picture on your blog as a Gadget

You can put a picture anywhere in your Blogger blog that you can insert a gadget - and you can make it link to a post in your blog or to any other website.

The Picture gadget

Dry dock in Claddagh Basin

A very simple way to put a picture into your blog is to use a Picture gadget. This is a tool that Blogger provides to make is easy to add a picture that shows up an all pages and is linked to somewhere.

Often gadgets (sometimes called widgets or page elements) are put on the sidebar - but in many blogger templates they can go almost anywhere.

Follow these steps to add a picture gadget:

1 Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2 Copy the location (URL or file system full path-name) of the picture - and remember whether it's on your computer, or on the internet.
(This article tells you how to find the URL of a picture that's already stored in Picasa. To find the URL of a picture on the internet, you can often right-click on it and choose "copy image location")

3 In Blogger, follow the usual Add a Gadget procedure, and choose the Picture gadget from the list of options.

4 In the Configure-Image box, enter the options you want for your picture. These include:

The title for the Gadget,
The caption for the picture
(the small words that go underneath it, usually explaining it, or where it came from),
What should happen when a reader clicks the picture - put this into the Link field
Where to find the picture
(ie the file-location that you copied in step 2)
Whether to re-size (ie shrink) the picture to fix the space in the sidebar in your current template.

5 Press Save.

6 If necessary, drag-and-drop the new gadget to the place where you want the picture to go, and press Save.

What your visitors see:

People who visit your blog in a web-browser, will see the picture, in the place where you put the gadget. However pictures are not supported gadgets for dynamic view templates, so it won't be see if you use one of these.

Also, people who see your blog through an RSS reader, or by receiving emailed updates don't see any gadgets, so they will not see the picture.

If you entered a value for Link, your visitor's browser leaves your blog and goes to the Link location: with the Picture gadget, then there is no way to make this open a new window. If you want to do so, then use an HTML gadget instead, get the code for the picture, and put target = "_blank" into it:, so the code looks something like:

<a href="YOUR LINK" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target = "_blank"><img border="0" src="YOUR PICTURE LOCATION" /></a>

Related Articles:

Options for putting pictures into your blog

Copyright, blogs and bloggers

Picasa and Blogger - an overview

Getting the HTML to add a picture to your blog

Finding a picture's location in Pisasa-web-albums

Finding the URL of a picture stored in Flickr

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for bloggers

Following a blog by email

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Putting a slideshow from Picasa into your blog

This article is about how to put a Picasa slideshow into your blog, using Picasa's slideshow tool.

It also looks at the security issues that may be involved in doing this, and suggests some ways around these.

Picasa, Albums and Slideshows:

Previously I've explained what Picasa is and how it is used by Blogger as the default place to store uploaded pictures.

You can also use Picasa in more complicated ways. You can put a set of pictures in a separate "album" (Picasa's word for a user-defined group of photos), and it will give you the HTML code to use to show these photos in your blog (or any other website).

There are two ways of doing this:

Link to the album: clicking on the link takes your visitor away from your website and into Picasa-web-albums, where they can use the PWA tools to look through the pictures
Link to a slideshow: this scrolls through the photos that are in the album at the time, right inside your website. Here's an example of a slideshow:

This article is a step-by-step guide to the second option, is showing a Picasa-web-album in your Blogger as a slideshow. A similar approach will work for other websites, thought the details will vary slightly.

How to insert your slideshow:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home), and log in with the Google account that owns (or you want to own) the album.

Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools.
Under the Edit drop-down (the one in the album, not the edit menu in the browser), check that Visibility is set to either "Anyone with the Link" or "Public on the web"
Click on "Link to this Album" (currently it's in a small font, 3/4 of the way down the right-hand sidebar - this may change if Picasa changes its interface)
Click on "Embed Slideshow" (currently this shows up underneath "Link ... " - and only AFTER you've clicked link...)
This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
Fill in the details you want
(slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
Go to Blogger and log in with a Google account that has rights to edit the the blog - note that this doesn't need to be the same account that owns the Picasa album.
You can put the code that you copied into your blog in the same way you would adding any other 3rd party HTML to it.

What you see in the Post Editor:

If you put the slideshow into a blog-post, the the way that the post-editor currently works with code means that the slideshow is not visible while you are editing the post. This means it's easy to accidentally over-write or delete the code.

One way around this is to put some "marker text" before and after it.

For example, I've put in <hr /> and <blockquote> </blockqoute> statements before and after the code just underneath this paragraph. While I'm in the editor, all I can see is a pair of parallel lines, with nothing between them. But (because you're visiting the blog after it's published) you can see a slideshow in between.

This makes the code look like:

<blockquote>
<hr />
<embed flashvars="host=picasaweb.google.com&hl=en_US&feat=flashalbum&RGB=0x000000&feed=https%3A%2F%2Fpicasaweb.google.com%2Fdata%2Ffeed%2Fapi%2Fuser%2F105223767362417288786%2Falbumid%2F5439615839989953921%3Falt%3Drss%26kind%3Dphoto%26authkey%3DGv1sRgCK7yg5XUpNHZtAE%26hl%3Den_US" height="192" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" src="https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="288"></embed>
<br />
<hr />
</blockquote>

What your visitors see - and can access:

The steps above puts a slideshow of the photos in the album at the current time into your blog post.

You can use the examples above to get an idea of how these slideshows work: they have next, play / pause, and previous buttons, and you can toggle captions on/off. The top example has auto-play ON, while the second one has it OFF.

On important thing to note: when your visitors click on the slideshow itself (anywhere but on previous / play / next buttons), they are taken to the place in Picasa-web-albums where the album is.

From here, they can get to ANY other albums owned by the same Google account that are either Public or Visible to Anyone With the Link.

This may or may not be a problem for you - but it's something that you should be aware of. It certainly was a problem for me initially, and I had to go and get a slideshow in a Google account with no personal pictures to make the examples in this post.

If you are not willing to live with this level of security, then I suspect (am yet to confirm) that using the RSS feed provided by Picasa with Blogger's own slideshow gadget may be a better approach. This will only work in places where you can put a gadget - although it may be possible to use a 3rd party service that converts a feed into Javascript to make code that can be put inside a post. Or totally different solution is to put your pictures into a PowerPoint slideshow and display it in your blog.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Hosting pictures outside of Google/Picasa

This article is about how to use pictures stored outside of Picasa-web-albums in your blog. It also looks at the risks and issues you might face if you do this

Where does Blogger usually store pictures

When you put a picture into a blog post, it is usually stored in Picasa-web-albums, the on-line part of Google's photo management tools.

For example, the picture at the start of this article was uploaded from my desktop, and so is stored in a folder in the Picasa-web-albums associated with my Google account.

I can see it here in the album:

Alternatives to Picasa-web-albums:

There are many other on-line photo storage and sharing options, eg Photobucket, flickr - and you can even use Google Docs which can now store files of all types.

For example, this photo (creative commons licensed, with no known copyright restrictions) is stored in flickr

To insert it into the post, I:

Copied the URL of the picture in flickr

Used the standard Picture icon on Post Editor toolbar in Blogger, and chose the "from URL" option, and pasted in the URL

But because the photo is hosted elsewhere (in this case in flickR), it is not put into Picasa-web-albums.

Instead the code for it points to the location in flickR where it's found:

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3309/3291223203_acbcce9483_m.jpg" /></a></div>

Hosting photographs elsewhere is one way to work around the size restrictions which Google has placed on Picasa-web-albums accounts. (Another is to link you blog to your Google + account).

You do need to make sure that the security options for the account and/or album that they're placed are set up so that at least anyone with the link is able to read the files.

Be aware that a photo that is stored outside of Picasa-web-albums cannot be used as the thumbnail for your post: if all the illustrations in a post are stored elsewhere, then the post simply will not have a thumbnail.

Risks and Issues:

Disappearing Photos:
When you don't control the files that pictures are in, there is a risk that the pictures might "disappear" if whoever is hosting them (flickR in the above example) decides to move them or even just change the structure of their URLs.

There is, of course, the same risk with PWA, but since you need to be signed in to put a file into Picasa, Google knows that it's yours and can email you and let you know about upcoming changes. flickR, on the other hand, has no record my setting up an URL to the photo, so cannot give me any warning.

Integration:
Picasa/Google have various tools for showing slideshows in blogs. The specific features that any photo-sharing tool has change from time to time, but by using the tools from Google there is more chance that the will definitely work well with other Google tools, like Blogger.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

What is Picasa - a very basic introduction

Picasa is Google's tool for managing image files. This basic explanation of how it works is especially useful for new Blogger users who need to understand where pictures that they load to their blog are kept.

What is Picasa

Abb 2 beugungsbilder komplementaerer blenden

Picasa is Google's tool for that individual people can use to manage and share image files (especially photographs) that they own or have the right to make copies of.

Picasa has three parts:

An application program ("Picasa") that you download, install and run on your PC. It works with the files store on your computer.
Picasa-web-albums (PWA): a place on the internet where you can store and share photos
Another application program (Picasa-web) that lets you manage photos stores in Picasa-web-albums. This software (like Blogger) runs totally inside your web-browser, and you don't ever have to download or install it.

The Picasa application program has an Upload button which lets you transfer copies of pictures from your PC to your Picasa-web-albums.

Your Picasa-web-albums are owned by your Google account - the same Google account that you use for Blogger, and various other Google tools.

Why Use Picasa-web-alblums:

It's how Blogger works
When you write a post in Blogger, it looks like you can upload pictures - and before 2006, this was how things worked.

But when Google took over Blogger, they saw that it was silly for them to have two different places for storing pictures.   So they set things up so that pictures uploaded in Blogger are stored in a Picasa-web-album.

And they added some features in Blogger so that as well as uploading pictures from your PC, can you also just choose ones that are already in Picasa-web-albums, and use them in your blog without making a second copy.

Photo sharing
Even people who aren't writing blogs want to share photographs with their friends.   Doing this by email gets cumbersome if you have a lot of photos, and can use a lot of space. A better alternative is to put the photographs in a place on the internet, set up the security so that you control who can see them, and then tell your friends where to find them.

Many on-line services for doing this have been developed - Picasa is Google's version. (Google Inc, the company, not google search.)

On-line backup:
Keeping a copy of your photos on-line is one way to ensure you have access to them even if something goes wrong with your PC (eg it crashes or is stolen).    Picasa is an option for this, but you should be aware that the copy stored in Picasa-web-albums may not have as much file-size as the original picture if it was uploaded through Blogger.

Personally, I always upload pictures through PWA, and then use links to them from Blogger, so that I can resolution of the pictures that are in my albums.

Next:

How Picasa Manages Pictures: Understanding Picasa, Picasa-web-albums and Blogger in-depth

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Building Image-only ads from Amazon

When Blogger users put an image-only link from Amazon into their blog, there is often a problem with the image not being found. It applies to code generated at Amazon, not to ads that are made using the Amazon widgets in Blogger.

Previously, I explained how to build customised Amazon product links for use in Blogger. You may need to do this if your readers are mainly not from the USA, or if you need to change the size of the advertisements.

One of the options for links is Image-only: the link shows a picture of the item, which your readers can click. When they click on the picture, they are taken to Amazon to buy the product.

This article explains how to fix the problem of the image not actually showing up on the published blog page, even though no error is reported and Amazon's reports say that the ad displayed.

What is causing the picture to not display?

The procedure for building an image-only link has a step:

"Save this image to your server, then cut and paste the HTML code in the lower left textbox into your web page."

Unfortunately, the HTML that Amazon generates assumes that you will save the image onto the same directory in the server that the web-page is stored on. This is fine for many web-site builders, but doesn't work for Blogger users who store their pictures in Picasa by default, or on other image-hosting services.

How to fix it:

You can fix the problem by uploading the image file to Picasa, or any other file host service, and altering the HTML to use this uploaded file.

Follow these steps:

Copy the HTML provided by Amazon's link-builder, and paste it into wherever you want it in your blog.
Copy the location of the image that Amazon is telling you to put onto your server.
In another window, log on to Picasa Web Albums using the same Google account that owns your blog
Choose Upload
Choose an album to put the image into
(You may want to keep a separate folder for all Amazon Associates products, or you may want some other arrangement eg one folder per page).
Use the From an URL tab, and enter the location that Amazon told you for the source of the image (copied in step 2)
Press Upload, and wait while the picture is loaded.
When the picture has loaded, Picasa-web-album shows the album summary page. Click on the picture you just loaded.
Click Link to this Photo (on the right hand bar) to get the link value (ie the URL or hyperlink) for the photo, and copy it.
Go back to the place in Blogger where you put the HTLM provided by Amazon in Step 1 and edit it.
The HTML will have this structure:
(I've put in some link breaks and bolding to make it easier to read - you can do the same, provided the Post Options - Ignore new lines option is selected ):

<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975841963?ie=UTF8&tag=bloggerhintsa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0975841963">
<img border="0"
src="41FxC9u%2B%2BVL._SL160_.jpg">
</a>
<img
src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=YOUR-AMAZON-ID=as2&o=1&a=0975841963" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />
Find where it says SRC "blah-blah-blah.jpg" (ie the piece in bold)
Select everything inside the quote marks, and replace it with the link value for the picture that you loaded into Picasa, so it becomes something like:

<a
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975841963?ie=UTF8&tag=bloggerhintsa-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0975841963">
<img border="0"
src="http://picasaweb.google.com/YOUR-GOOGLE-ACCOUNT/YOUR-ALBUM-NAME?authkey=Gv1sRgCOGyrv2X0-OvmAE#5430348305093079170">
</a>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=YOUR-AMAZON-ID=as2&o=1&a=0975841963" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />
Save the change (ie publish the post, or save the gadget etc).

Here are some examples of working image links:

How to build customised Amazon product links for use in Blogger

Putting third-party HTML into your blog

Hosting pictures outside Picasa

Finding a Picture's URL in Picasa-web-albums

Understanding Google accounts

Picasa and Picasa-web-albums, and overview.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Inserting an animated picture into your blog

This article has detailed steps for inserting an animated picture into your blogspot blog.

Previously I've given detailed instructions for inserting a picture into a Blogger post and inserting a picture into your blog's sidebar.

However some people have reported that if they upload an animated picture from their PC, these instructions don't work correctly: the picture is uploaded but animation is missing.

The work-around seems to be to upload the picture to a hosting site (like Picasa) first - independently of blogger. Then note the URL of the uploaded file, and enter it as:

The web-address (URL) during the picture upload process, or

The URL when you use the Picture gadget.

You can then manipulate the uploaded picture as per any other picture (ie for gadgets, drag the gadget around in the Layout / Page Elements view, or drag the picture or manually relocate the HTML for images that are inside posts.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Pictues, Albums and Slideshows - Advantanges and Disadvantages

This article summarises the advantages and disadvantages of using individual pictures, album links and slideshows in your blog.

In the Picasa overview article, I described Picasa web albums as a tool that stores individual pictures, grouped into albums. It also has tools that let you display the pictures from an album in a slideshow.

When should you use each type of Picasa item

Really, the answer to this depends on your blog, the amount of time you want to spend, and what you want to show your readers. This table helps to work through the options.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Individual picture	Quick and easy The best option if you only want one or two photos. You have total control of how the text is shown relative to the picture (with some HTML coding) Readers don't have to click anything - they're shown all the pictures when the page loads.	Very time consuming if you want to do more than a few pictures. Readers have to see/download all the pictures on the page, even if they're only slightly interested. Captions that you've entered in Picasa are not shown to readers.
Album link	Gives readers a "taste" of your set of photos, with them having to download all of them. You can apply extra security (requiring sign-in to view particular albums) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible	Some readers won't think to click on the album, so will miss out on seeing the photos except for the album cover. Readers who click the link are taken away from your blog to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the photos. Some readers will be confused because they don't understand the Picasa-web-albums application.
As a Slideshow	Readers don't have to leave your Blog to see all the photos. You choose if the slideshow plans when the page is loaded, or only when the reader clicks the play icon. (NB only if you use the slideshow-code generator from Picasa-web-albums. Not currently part of the standard slideshow Gadget) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible (optional unless you use the standard Gadget)	"All or nothing" - a slideshow includes all the pictures from the selected album, not just a subset. Auto-advancing photos in a slideshow may be very distracting for readers. Readers cannot control how quickly the slides in the slideshow are advanced, and sometimes the caption can appear before the next photo does - this may not be good for readers who have a slow internet connection. (However they do have buttons for previous, pause and next if you don't use the Slideshow Gadget - and they have buttons to take them to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the slideshow).

Putting an album into your sidebar

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 1 in this article shows you how to put it into a gadget.

Once it's there, you may like to move it to a new location (while you're still in the layout editor), or centre-align it.

What your readers see:

Amazon recommendations

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Related Articles:

Picasa & Blogger - Part 1, What is Picasa?

Picasa & Blogger - Part 2, Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

Centering gadgets

Copyright, blogs and bloggers - copyright applies to pictures too.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Understanding Picasa (under development)

This article (when finished) will describe in detail how Picasa web albums manages photographs. In the meantime, it's just a stub, put here because I published under this topic heading a long time ago, and never finished it. Apologies for any inconvenience.

All about ...

On your PC, file are stored in folders, and folders can have sub-folders inside them.

In the Picasa application program on your PC, photos are stored in folders, which correspond to folders on your PC. But there are also albums, which are not the same as sub-folders on the PC: an album is a collection of links to photographs within their folders, not of photographs themselves. So if you delete an album, you aren't necessarily deleting the photos too. (NEED TO DOUBLE CHECK THIS)

The same thing is true in Picasa-web-albums: you can create albums, which are logical collections of photographs, and indeed slideshows of these albums.

... more, including diagrams, coming soon

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Finding a picture's location (URL) in Picasa-web-albums

This article is about how to find the URL (web-address) of a picture that is stored in Picasa web albums. It is written for Blogger users, but the same technique can be used by anyone who uses Picasa-web-albums.

Picasa-web-albums and your PC

An Introduction to Picasa. describes the relationship between Picasa and Picasa-web-albums. A key difference between is that :

Picasa is a program, written by Google, which runs on your PC even when it's not connected to the internet, and
Picasa-web-albums is a Google application on the internet that runs on the internet, and some accompanying space on the internet where your pictures can be stored.

Each and every picture that you store in your Piscasa-web-albums has a unique URL, ie web-address, where it can be found.

To find the URL of a picture in Picasa-web-albums:

Sign in to Picasa-web-albums, using the google account that owns the album that has the picture you want. (If you are already signed in to Blogger you may not have to log in again.)

Find the album that has the picture you want to use
Click on the album to open it.

Note: each album has one picture, usually the first one loaded, set as the cover. Be careful to actually open the album, and not just work with the album cover, because the URL for it is not the same as the URL for the picture.
Click on the picture you want: it will open in a "photo" view.
Click on "Link to this Photo" in the right-hand bar.
This opens two fields: Link, which has the URL, and Embedded Image which has the HTML to put the photo into a web-page.
Copy the contents of the Link field: this is the URL of the picture.

Note: in some browsers (eg Firefox, Chrome) you may just be able to right-click on the picture once you're in "photo" view, and choose "copy link location".

Linking to a Picasa web-album in a blogger post

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 2 in this article shows you how to put it into a post.

Once it's there, you can use any of the regular options for formatting items in the Post Editor - though you will probably need to use HTML mode to this, because the code from PWA puts the album inside a table, which is something that the Post Editor doesn't handle well.

Amazon recommendations

What your readers see:

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Inserting a picture into a blog post

This article about integrating Picasa and Blogger has instructions for inserting a picture into a blog post or page.

It applies no matter whether the picture comes from, but has particular information about pictures that are already in Picasa.

Pictures and blog posts

When you want to put a picture into a blog post, you can either upload it through Blogger's editor, or upload it to somewhere on the internet first, and then just link to that location from Blogger.

I recommend uploading pictures outside Blogger because you can control the size and picture quality of the uploaded files: if you do the upload through Blogger, then the resolution is often reduced and this can make your pictures look fuzzy. However I do recommend using Picasa-web-albums as the "somewhere else on the internet, because only pictures stored in Picasa can be used as thumbnail images for your post.

How to put a picture into a post

1 Make sure you know where the original picture is and that you have copyright permission to use it.

2 If the photo is not already on the internet, upload it to Picasa-web-albums, or another tool (eg Flickr, Photobox, etc) that will give you the link to the picture.

3 Copy the internet-location (ie the URL) of the picture file, (This article tells you how to find the location of a picture that's stored in-Picasa web-albums.)

4 Click the picture icon on the toolbar:

4 Enter the picture location into the box that opens.

If the picture is on your computer use the "Upload an image" dialog, or if it is on the internet, use the "Web address(URL" option.

5 Click Ok.

6 The picture you have chosen appears in your Edit Posts window.

Controlling the pictures in your post:

Size and alignment:
When you click on a picture, a small menu opens (generally beside or under the picture), with options to:

choose the size (small, medium, large, extra-large),
align it (left, centre or right)
remove it

If you want the picture to sit in the middle of a paragraph of text, rather than underneath it,

Go in to Edit HTML mode
Locate the picture you want
Delete the line before it that says

<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">

Delete the first line after it that says

</div>

Picture Position:
Quite often, pictures that you add through the toolbar are put at the start of the post, or perhaps the start of the current paragraph, instead of exactly where you want them.

You can often move a picture around by drag-and-drop (click the picture, drag it, and drop it where you want it to go) - though sometimes this doesn't work as well as it should.

You may need to edit the HTML to move the picture around: to do this, go into Edit HTML mode, and find the code for your picture relative to the other text in your post. Every case is a little different, but in general the code for a picture looks like:

<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/tkoGx2454hA/s1600-h/Inserting+a+picture.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-ufFKAr0d1qmq9aW1KZfNNsv-AbPNBP0y739vGFE5k_qh3d0L2VvpYad99hacIJ43NVQtcwTW5ABdd4rba9DLBlzz0RABme-IMzdy28SvaiCwDB_-1EG6oqf4kDwZfgylWifcOKtc5it5/s400/Inserting+a+picture.gif" /> </a>

If you want to move a picture by editing the HTML, make sure that you take all the code between the opening <a href .... and the closing </a>

For more information about how picture code is structured and how you can change it, see stopping pictures in your blog from being "clickable". and putting text and pictures side by side.

Putting a Picasa slideshow into your sidebar

This article shows how to put a slideshow from Picasa-web-albums into a gadget on your blog.

Overview

Previously I've described the options for linking your blog and Picasa-web-albums, and noted that putting a slideshow into a gadget is one option.

A slideshow is a set of photos that automatically advance from one to the next - it's a little different from an album, which is just a collection of photos with no auto-advance feature.

There are two approaches you can take to putting a PWA slideshow into your blog:

Getting the code from Picasa and using a HTML/Javascript gadget.
Using Blogger's slideshow gadget.

The 2nd option is easier, but the first (usually) gives you more control over how the slideshow works.

HTML/Javascript Gadget Approach:

(NB a similar approach will work for other blogging tools, eg Wordpress, thought the details will vary slightly)

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Choose an album by clicking on it.

The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album"
Click on "Embed Slideshow"
This opens a new dialog box, over the top of your current browser window.
Fill in the option details you want (slideshow size, whether or not to show captions and to autoplay the slides, etc)
Copy the HTML from the box at the bottom of the left hand-side (the one labelled "Copy and paste ..."
You can now put this HTML into your blog, the same way you would add any other 3rd party HTML : option 1 in this article describes how to put it into a gadget.

Alternative:

You may be able to use the slideshow gadget instead. To do this, follow steps 1 and 2, and then:

Go to Picasa Web Albums (http://picasaweb.google.com/home).
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now)
Return to Blogger, and:
In pre-Sept-2011 Blogger, go to Design / Page Elements in Blogger, or
In post-Sept-211 Blogger, to do the Layout tab
Click "Add a gadget" in the area where you want to put the slideshow.
Choose the Slideshow gadget,
Choose these options - in the order shown (ie work down the page - some of the bottom options won't have the right values availabl until the earlier ones are set)

Source = Picasa web albums
Option = Album
Username = the name of the google account where the album is stored. (eg, mine is maryc.fromnz)
Album = which ever album your photos are in.

Save the gadget, and check that the position is correct.

Some people advise against saying that Picasa-web-albums is the source: they suggest choosing Other, and just pasting in the album's URL. I haven't yet found any reasons for this, but it's worth trying if using Picasa as a source doesn't work for you.